


a little dream for the future

by typewritings



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Gen, Plans For The Future, Post-Reveal Pre-Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, Post-Reveal Pre-Relationship, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, love me them tags sometimes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2019-11-17
Packaged: 2021-02-08 02:01:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21468226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/typewritings/pseuds/typewritings
Summary: Marinette and Adrien aren't dating and Alya wants toscreamabout it becausehow are you lovebirds not dating, have youseenyourselves?Nino is just here for his bro's happiness and his girlfriend's conspiracies.
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir & Alya Césaire & Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug & Nino Lahiffe, Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, Alya Césaire/Nino Lahiffe
Comments: 52
Kudos: 555





	a little dream for the future

Alya wonders how her life has come to this.

She’s not complaining—oh no, far from it, she loves the way things are, right now—but she can’t help her curiosity when she looks at her best friend who has her head on her crush’s lap and isn’t spontaneously combusting at the mere contact. It’s strange, because one day Marinette was stuttering and blushing and making a fool out of herself in front of Adrien, the next day she was laughing and teasing and sharing jokes with him.

First of all, how?

Second of all, _how_?

Alya doesn’t have an answer. However, Marinette _does_, and Alya _wants_ that answer, but she’s not _getting_ that answer.

“What do you mean?” Marinette asks, when Alya first brings it up, before realization dawns on her. “Oh. That. I’ll tell you everything some other day, but not now.”

“Some other day!” Marinette laughs as Alya pulls her away from Adrien to interrogate her. “Don’t be so impatient!”

“Some other day, Alya,” Marinette says, smiling as they wait for the boys to join them on the stairs in front of the school.

“I’ll tell you some other day, promise,” Marinette says when Alya corners her in the classroom after everyone’s left for lunch.

“I can’t tell you right now,” Marinette says, and Alya can see the guilt in her eyes. “I want to tell you, but I can’t. Some other day.”

Alya lets it go after that, because she knows Marinette feels bad for keeping something from her (and anyways, knowing Marinette, it won’t stay secret long), and she doesn’t want to wreck their friendship anymore. It’s bad enough they’ve nearly fallen apart because of Lila; Alya doesn’t want to take anymore chances. She can’t risk losing her best friend.

She’s learned to stop bringing Lila up whenever she’s with Marinette. She can manage to refrain from pestering Marinette daily for an answer about her newfound comfort with Adrien.

(Anyways, that’s what she thought. It’s been months since then, and Marinette is still as tight-lipped about the whole issue as she had been at the beginning. Alya’s learned to drop it, but _gods_, if her curiosity isn’t eating her up from the inside. Not even Nino can get any details from Adrien. She supposes she’ll actually have to wait for some other day to come.)

Which brings her to their current situation.

The four of them are comfortably settled in Marinette’s room in various positions, barely awake but unwilling to fall asleep yet. They’ve come over to do their homework after their last class, then stayed for dinner because Sabine insisted (and it’s hard to win against Sabine Cheng when she’s determined), then suddenly it was dark out and Tom Dupain offered to let them sleep over, so here they are, awake at 2 AM on a Friday night because Adrien said he’s never stayed up all night before.

“We’re gonna feel like death tomorrow,” Nino says, “but I’ll do it for you, dude.”

Alya thinks she hears Marinette whisper _weakling_ under her breath but she might have heard wrong and no one else seems to have noticed, so she might be imagining things too (Adrien coughs to mask his laughter but Alya doesn’t connect the dots).

Both Nino and Alya are leaning heavily against each other in the middle of their makeshift bed, which is really just a bunch of pillows and covers thrown randomly together on Marinette’s bedroom floor. Adrien is sitting across from them, his back against Marinette’s longue chaise which shouldn't be very comfortable, but he’s not complaining, so Alya supposes it isn’t actually that bad. Meanwhile, Marinette is lying down on the floor, her head on Adrien’s lap, barely awake.

Every so often, Adrien has to shake her awake. “You okay there, princess?”

“Sleepy,” Marinette mumbles back, blinking groggily. “Haven’t pulled an all-nighter in a while now.”

Adrien laughed quietly under his breath. His hands start playing with Marinette’s hair. “And when was that?”

Marinette blinks slowly, once. “That... Design contest. A while.” She makes a weird noise. “Stop, you’re making me sleepier.”

“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Alya murmurs to Nino as she watches her best friend and Adrien talk. They’re talking so softly she can’t make out their conversation, but she doesn’t need to know what they’re talking about to decipher their expressions.

“If you mean the dudes over there in their own world,” Nino says and Alya can feel his heavy sigh reverberate through his body, “then yes, I see what you’re seeing. ”

Alya doesn’t get how Adrien and Marinette are not a thing yet, despite all signs proving it otherwise. It frustrates her to no end that neither of them are doing anything about their feelings for each other, despite being so disgustingly _obvious_. The two of them spend most of their time together—whenever Adrien has time in his packed schedule—to the point that she and Nino have to crash their plans to be able to hang out with their respective best friend.

(At first, Alya was happy that Marinette was finally making progress with her so-called hopeless crush. Then happiness turned to confusion, as the two seemed to behave as if they knew each other their whole lives, before it turned to mild annoyance that Marinette wasn’t hanging out with her as much anymore.)

Another matter is Adrien’s nickname for Marinette, which isn’t a _bad_ thing, if just strange. 

Alya knows for certain that, back in the days, had Marinette been called ‘Princess’ by Adrien, she’d have spontaneously combusted on the spot right in front of him. And yet, the Marinette now only rolls her eyes, smiles fondly and takes everything in stride.

Sometimes, Alya catches her flicking the space below Adrien’s chin and looking bemused for an instant, as if something was missing, but then it’s gone and she flicks his forehead instead, giggling when he grimaces back at her.

“What time is it?” Marinette yawns, and snuggles further into Adrien’s lap. The boy looks like he’s been given the greatest gift ever and the soft look on his face should be _illegal_.

Alya checks her phone. “Just a bit before three.”

“Who’s turn is it to confess something?” Nino asks. They’d started the game a couple of hours earlier in an attempt to make the time pass quicker. 

Both Marinette and Adrien had been wary at first, but after a silent conversation with their eyes—which Alya was not privy to—they’d finally agreed to play. Nino started them off by admitting his crush on Marinette prior to dating Alya. Alya confessed about having four more sideblogs. Marinette said she’d stolen Adrien’s phone, leading him to tease her about it for a good minute or so. Then he unabashedly revealed his crush on Ladybug, which made Marinette roll her eyes.

“You’re too good for her,” Marinette had said.

Alya had quickly jumped to Ladybug’s defence. So did Adrien. Nino backed Marinette up, claiming that Adrien was just _too good, the end_, whatever that meant.

It was a mess but they were all giggling and Marinette kept turning redder with every compliment they gave Ladybug and Alya was confused why she’d be so angry until she cracked and laughed so hard they couldn't help but join in. 

Now, hours into the game, the four of them had quickly run out of secrets to confess (that aren’t related to secret identities. Alya can’t just tell Marinette and Adrien that she and Nino are Rena Rouge and Carapace, respectively. Superhero rule).

“Me, I think,” Marinette struggles to keep her eyes open and wrinkles her nose as she ponders Nino’s question. “But the all-nighter thing.”

Alya narrows her eyes. “Doesn’t count,” she cheerfully says and eyes her best friend pointedly. “Why don’t you fess up about—” she makes a vague gesture towards Adrien— “over there?”

“We’re not dating,” Marinette immediately says, missing the way Adrien seems to droop at her words. 

“Never said you were.” Nino tries to calm her down, knowing from past experience that Marinette could get very heated about her thoughts.

“I’m not asking you about that,” Alya sighs. She’ll get her ship to sail another day. “But operation Secret Garden? Ring a bell?”

Marinette’s mouth opens in surprise. Alya can nearly see the gears turning in her head, working overtime despite her being half-asleep on Adrien’s lap. 

“Operation Secret Garden?” Adrien asks.

Marinette turns red. “Oh. That.” She fiddles with a lock of her hair before Adrien grabs her hand, stopping her, and then presses a kiss to her knuckles, smiling. 

“Oh my god,” Alya says, but neither of them react to her words.

“Just a past complicated and convoluted plan to ask you out—before, you know,” Marinette ends up saying, and Alya wonders what she means by the ‘you know’—which Adrien _does_ know, if the spark of recognition in his eyes is anything to go by.

“Baby August got akumatized so it obviously failed,” Marinette continues. “So there went the first part of my plan.”

“A shame.”

“Truly,” Marinette agrees, eyes closed, smiling. “I used to daydream about our future, you know. I had everything planned out, from the wedding to our house, and our interior design. Even picked our kids’ names already.”

Adrien looks like he’s had his breath knocked out of him, eyes impossibly fond as they stare at the girl on his lap. “Yeah?”

Marinette hums. “Hugo, Louis and Emma. Two boys, one girl. We’d have pets too. Maybe a cat.”

“Let’s get the cat. Oh, and—” 

“And a hamster,” Marinette finishes for him. “We’ll name it—”

Alya doesn’t know if she’s seeing things or if Adrien is actually getting misty-eyed, touched by Marinette’s (scarily) detailed future fantasy. 

At some point, their fantasy was starting to sound less hypothetical and more like actual future plans.

“Should we leave?” Nino whispers to Alya, his eyes glued to the scene before him. Alya doesn’t blame him; she hasn’t torn her eyes away from their obviously-in-love friends either.

It’s things like this that make Alya doubt Marinette every time she says she and Adrien are not dating. Her doubts surface in the way Adrien looks at Marinette like she’s hung the stars and the moon, the way he visibly perks up every time he catches sight of her, the way his eyes linger on her whenever she leaves a room, the way he grins satisfyingly when he manages to make her laugh with a pun, and so on.

And Marinette is no better, as she tries to convince Alya that she and Adrien are just friends. Alya notices it in the way Marinette gently tugs Adrien away whenever Chloe or Lila latches onto his arm, the way her face brightens at the sight of _his_ face lighting up whenever she brings him pastries from her parents’ bakery, the way she shakes her head and groans and smiles fondly at him when he says a particularly bad pun, the way she just _looks_ every time he’s by her side. 

It’s enough to make someone believe in love again.

“We can just go to sleep,” Alya ends up whispering back to Nino. It’s late (or early, technically?), after all, and honestly, none of them seem like they’re going to be able to stay up all night.

Except Adrien, perhaps.

Marinette has already fallen asleep, missing the way Adrien is gazing at her, like she’s made all his dreams come true (or like she’s given him a dream worth thinking about).

And maybe she has. 

As they shuffle around to find a comfortable position for the night without waking Marinette up, Alya wonders if Marinette will ever face her feelings for Adrien again. She wonders if her best friend’s crush will come back, though she’s quite certain it never disappeared.

She wonders if she’ll know when it happens.

“Hey, kitty?” Alya hears a voice softly speak, slurring slightly as her mind slowly wanders off to dreamland. “I think I love you.”

Her eyes close. 

“I love you too, princess.”

She falls asleep.

When Alya wakes in the morning, it feels like she’s forgotten something important. She ignores it. It’ll probably come back to her, if she needs it.

**Author's Note:**

> Extra bit: Sometimes, as Alya watches Ladybug and Chat Noir being affectionate (like a couple) while denying being a couple, she wonders if Ladybug and Chat Noir's civilians friends are suffering just as much as she is when it comes to oblivious obvious couples.
> 
> shout-out to [anna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MajesticAnna) for beta-ing this fic, it was a mess, a lot of conjunctions, and it's still a mess, but less conjunctions. thanks for upgrading it :') <s>no the extra line was not beta-ed, so if it's a mess, it ME</s>
> 
> this just me wanting to write post-reveal pre-adrienette fluff... more specifically two dorks being in love and marinette talking about what her plans for their future looked like and adrien just being in love w marinette ok. self-indulgence at its finest uwu
> 
> edit: so i think it's fair that i link to [the fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21022256) that basically led me to writing this, because i've been searching the wrong tags and i never found it until today smH
> 
> comments and kudos appreciated! yell at me on tumblr :D
> 
> tumblr | [@typowritings](https://typowritings.tumblr.com/)  
reblog | [x](https://typowritings.tumblr.com/post/189130803814/a-little-dream-for-the-future-typewritings)


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